We’ve been eagerly watching the price of AMD’s acclaimed Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU since the pricier 9850X3D was launched, and in April we’ve finally seen it drop below the £380 mark for the first time. Right now, you can pick one up for just £379.98 in the UK, saving you 16% over the original MSRP. What’s more, if you buy it before 25 April, you’ll get open-world fantasy adventure Crimson Desert for free with it – a game that usually costs £54.99 on Steam.
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D + Crimson Desert
£449.99 £379.98
“The conqueror of frame rates is here. All hail the new gaming champ.” – Read our review.
I’ll note that Amazon says you can buy this CPU for an even cheaper price of £370.91 at the moment (the lowest ever for this chip), although it comes from a seller with only 79% positive feedback, and there’s no mention of the free game deal. As such, I’d pay the small amount of extra money to get it supplied directly from Amazon with the Crimson Desert offer, just to be sure. Either way, it’s still a great price for this top CPU.
This CPU’s secret sauce is a huge slab of 3D V-cache that AMD has placed under its 8-core chiplet. This gives it 64MB more L3 cache than AMD’s non-X3D 8-core CPUs, such as the Ryzen 7 9700X, which makes for a killer gaming CPU. All that extra high-speed local memory massively reduces the chance of a cache miss, and the need to page your PC’s slower system RAM, meaning the CPU can focus on maintaining your frame rates.
What’s more, unlike the last-gen Ryzen 7 7800X3D, this CPU has a higher clock speed of 5.2GHz, rather than just 5GHz. Add that to the potent performance of AMD’s Zen 5 architecture, and you get a chip that’s fast across the board. It’s not as quick as the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D, naturally, but it’s not far behind. Basically, if gaming is your top priority, this is one of the best CPUs available, especially at this new price.
As the extra cache is under the chiplet, rather than on top of it (as with earlier X3D chips), there’s also a bit more thermal headroom. That means there’s also scope to overclock this chip if you have a decent cooling system – check out our guide to buying the best CPU cooler to find one that’s up to the job.
To pick up a 9800X3D for £379.98, and a free copy of Crimson Desert, click on this link here to take you to the right Amazon page. If you’re looking to upgrade more of your setup at the same time, check out our best motherboard guide for our top picks of homes for this CPU.
